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PostPosted: Wed Oct 17, 2018 4:41 pm 

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Tax_Man,

I and others with scripting experience have offered to help and have gotten nowhere. I found Bob to be too difficult to work with and very condescending, after hours in a Skype call we literally accomplished nothing.

I don't mean roll back to the active numbers, I mean roll back to better crafting systems, better dungeons, better systems in almost every way. Bob and the team have put 100s of hours into changes that no one wanted - as can be seen by the current number of active players. Not to mention the plethora of bugs that were added with each change.

I've tried logging in and playing, but the game has completely changed for the worse. There are plenty of successful UO shards still running so what's the excuse? It's really cut and dry actually - The game sucks. Who else is to blame but the people who run the game?

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PostPosted: Mon Oct 22, 2018 10:02 am 
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A total "rollback" like would involve rolling back the version of Sphere which I know will never happen. A lot of the more popular servers do not run Sphere and Sphere has less support (at least in my opinion) than other server emulators.

That being said though, what new aspects do you really hate and should just go away?

Like you mention crafting.. do you mean just removing the "dot-clicking" scheme that was added a while back?

We need specifics if we want it addressed. I honestly don't have a strong opinion one way or another about most of the things players have complained about since all of the changes, so I'm all ears to planning fixes, specific system reverts, and anything else we need to do but I can tell you for certain there will never be something like a full rollback to T2 or whatever.

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PostPosted: Mon Oct 29, 2018 7:27 pm 

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Kraken,

Well the crafting menus, methods, and leveling all have changed, I haven't played in a few years so I don't remember any specifics. I just know too many things are different for no good reason.

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PostPosted: Wed Oct 31, 2018 3:57 pm 
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Kraken,

Well the crafting menus, methods, and leveling all have changed, I haven't played in a few years so I don't remember any specifics. I just know too many things are different for no good reason.
Well if you can get us some specifics either it can be re-looked at and see if the original reason they were changed is still valid and it not re-visit the changes.

Although I will say that with the exception of three things i can think of that were done specifically because they were on my personal list, nothing else was done by me "for no reason". A lot of the crafting changes, for example were done to expand the system to allow for more options(such as colored furniture), reduce people feeling they "must" macro(batch crafting), and make leveling less tedious(accumulated successes negating streaks of bad luck).

Changes and balance are one of those weird things, in that most of the time people are more annoyed things changed rather than whether it was a good change. Especially when you're balancing something that people relied upon being unbalanced (such as removing necromancers instant-kill).


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PostPosted: Wed Oct 31, 2018 7:38 pm 
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Kraken,

Well the crafting menus, methods, and leveling all have changed, I haven't played in a few years so I don't remember any specifics. I just know too many things are different for no good reason.
Well if you can get us some specifics either it can be re-looked at and see if the original reason they were changed is still valid and it not re-visit the changes.

Although I will say that with the exception of three things i can think of that were done specifically because they were on my personal list, nothing else was done by me "for no reason". A lot of the crafting changes, for example were done to expand the system to allow for more options(such as colored furniture), reduce people feeling they "must" macro(batch crafting), and make leveling less tedious(accumulated successes negating streaks of bad luck).

Changes and balance are one of those weird things, in that most of the time people are more annoyed things changed rather than whether it was a good change. Especially when you're balancing something that people relied upon being unbalanced (such as removing necromancers instant-kill).
I can think a few things off the top of my head I know people don't like. One of which was the despell option damaging PVMers rather then working as intended. Personally I think that was one of the bigger mistakes and I'm sure majority agrees with me.

On another note I agree with you bob as far as not passing the shard on. I am positive no one here would continue the legacy for longer then a few years if given the chance (in this state realistically 6 months). But that doesn't mean it can't be improved on. At this point we should focus building a small community of active players before attempting to tackle larger projects. Create some type of reward system for playing, daily tasks in a sense.

While Ultima Online is an old game people are still super interested. Hell UOOutlands was launched 3 days ago, its T2A like we used to be. Its got thousands of players.

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PostPosted: Sat Nov 03, 2018 11:51 am 
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Kraken,

Well the crafting menus, methods, and leveling all have changed, I haven't played in a few years so I don't remember any specifics. I just know too many things are different for no good reason.
Well if you can get us some specifics either it can be re-looked at and see if the original reason they were changed is still valid and it not re-visit the changes.

Although I will say that with the exception of three things i can think of that were done specifically because they were on my personal list, nothing else was done by me "for no reason". A lot of the crafting changes, for example were done to expand the system to allow for more options(such as colored furniture), reduce people feeling they "must" macro(batch crafting), and make leveling less tedious(accumulated successes negating streaks of bad luck).

Changes and balance are one of those weird things, in that most of the time people are more annoyed things changed rather than whether it was a good change. Especially when you're balancing something that people relied upon being unbalanced (such as removing necromancers instant-kill).
I can think a few things off the top of my head I know people don't like. One of which was the despell option damaging PVMers rather then working as intended. Personally I think that was one of the bigger mistakes and I'm sure majority agrees with me.

On another note I agree with you bob as far as not passing the shard on. I am positive no one here would continue the legacy for longer then a few years if given the chance (in this state realistically 6 months). But that doesn't mean it can't be improved on. At this point we should focus building a small community of active players before attempting to tackle larger projects. Create some type of reward system for playing, daily tasks in a sense.

While Ultima Online is an old game people are still super interested. Hell UOOutlands was launched 3 days ago, its T2A like we used to be. Its got thousands of players.
A long, long time ago, before the dispel fix went in, I did a survey and a lot of interviews over what people thought were "essential" features of Obsidian, and what they thought they'd be ok giving up to return to a more "T2A" experience.

Fortunately, or unfortunately depending on your view, a lot of staples of obsidian that broadband and company put in were deemed as essential keeps, such as stone wall potions. And the stat/skill cap growth obsidian has.

The problem arises when you have these decidedly non-t2a options that greatly affect PVP balance, but you want everything else to stay exactly like the old T2A, which produces some unique and overpowered combinations. Whenever you change something for balance, people decry "But that's not how it was in T2A".

The problem is we can't have it both ways.
The dispel change and many in that same time such as poison revamp came as a result of that survey, and a couple constructed PVP events afterwards to test the assertion they were making, as well as a few "gm-encouraged" overworld pvp events.

Some were viewed pretty ok, these were mostly the changes that affected high-level pvp.
Some were greatly admonished, these were mostly the changes that affected low-effort pvp and ganking.
Note I said mostly, not all.

The problem comes at the end of the day, where people will always want to protect advantages in their favor, and decry advantages in favor of others. I am not immune to that, which is why any pvp-oriented changes (even dispel) had to pass a staff vote at the time.

And any pvp changes going forward will still pass that same vote, which I will (hopefully) always be outnumbered in.

Dispel can be reverted. However i'd argue it needs tweaking more than reversion, because the reasons it was put in are still valid, in that it is a disproportionately powerful spell in that we operate under the old old t2a method that blanks everything rather than the newer graduated level for the mana cost / cast time, and there is realisticaly almost no skillful counter of it due to the low cast time, the exception being stonewall pots which only then bump it up to mass dispel level which also has a slightly low timer.

The alternative pitched at the time was to raise the cast timer on dispel slightly, which people balked at even more. So the hp reduction was the compromise. And again, it definitely still needs tweaking, so even if it doesn't go away outright its getting adjustments on the "to-do list" (i think it's gotten tweaked almost every major patch since it was put in trying to zero in on it).

But again, these are just my thoughts, and only one vote on this change, like any other.
There are very few sacred cows in obsidian, as long as a change has justifiable reason it will go in. the problem lies in "because it feels right" or "this is wrong fix it" doesn't help and doesn't justify anything.

Which is why we had so many threads on "What is pvp supposed to be like to you" and "How should pvp balance work" and suc things, to get peoples opinions and try to codify what all they were looking for. The end result is problematic because what is balanced to one person is not balanced to another. There is an ashes relandi quote, for example, that a good pvp experience to him is that he wants to, and my memory might be missing some spots here, "Gank someone hunting, dry loot their corpse, and shittalk their ghost".

UO had great pvp, but it also had a great amount of griefing. While I don't want to take that entirely away, I generally believed that when a pvp situation has absolutely no counter no matter how skilled both players are, it generally needs looked at, if that situation is a 1 on 1. 2 on 1 and higher, you're on your own, don't get ganked. :) But if you don't look at those situations, they end up self-selecting and almost no one plays them outside of masochists because it's unplayable. Which works out to your game having mechanics that are effectively worthless and shrinks your game. Same reason why a lot of lesser used skills got buffs.

Tl/dr - Just another giant rant. I'd love to nuke off most of our non-t2a alterations, but most people want to keep at least some of them, which neccessitates others.
As I said, new staff are welcome to revert that change, but I will fight against(with my 1 vote) any solution that is just "undo this change" that doesn't address the underlying reasons why the change was suggested, voted on by staff, and put in in the first place.

Personally we could undo a lot of this shit if we took off obsidian's age based stat and skill bonus (which gives vets too much imbalance) and reverted some of the other non-t2a changes. But that would lose the "obsidian" experience a lot of people like.


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PostPosted: Sat Nov 03, 2018 4:58 pm 
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PVP, Crafting, and Economy is the bread and butter of this shard. This was already nearly perfected, what many players don't understand is why it is being changed. The problem is staff is focusing on the wrong things to change which is what's upsetting us.

What we want is content that doesn't drastically alter the 3 pillars.


Personal list of how we could improve.
1. Bring the old system back that what we all loved and cherished. (Consists of Item drops as normal. Balance pvp by reverting dispell. Etc..)

2. Content, with the pillars in mind.
Example of great content you added was bosses/drops. They drop unique items that can give you that extra edge in battle vs someone who doesn't. The bless deeds are great because you can bless those boss items for 3 months. However even though they wont drop in pvp the boss items break quickly people have to decide if its worth it. (This content should be tested to perfect durability of items)

3. Events and in depth lore. Get creative create some lore and fun quest lines that drop unique rewards. For example once you have a ship ingame you can find a shipwrecked pirate crew. You end up helping them and at the end you are awarded with a cool pirate hat.

Extra Comments.
-Like venom stated much of the content was removed by echo ingame. I believe echo told me it was in anticipation of adding new content. There should be a rule implemented among staff that projects need to be nearly complete prior to implementing it. Meaning the only thing left to do is add stuff in.

-I like the idea of making all the skills relevant. Combining the skills with new content how you have been doing is a great mix.

-Lastly, just something I've always wanted to see in game. We should utilize hues. There are so many in game but we are so limited. It would be cool to have some sort of daily task enticing players to get on by rewarding them with a currency spent on unique hues. Maybe a random hue potion with potential of rare ones.

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PostPosted: Sun Nov 04, 2018 6:39 am 
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First, thank you for having this discussion. I appreciate it, because you're giving clear actionable comments.
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PVP, Crafting, and Economy is the bread and butter of this shard. This was already nearly perfected, what many players don't understand is why it is being changed. The problem is staff is focusing on the wrong things to change which is what's upsetting us.
I think the core disagreement is that people believed we were balanced beforehand. This is reinforced because, relatively speaking, the bulk of the balance changes(some of which were merely bug-fxies that people had gotten used to as usable pvp bugs) happened near the extinction event of the original time-stop bug, which is what cost us most of our original playerbase. So people associated the two. We lost 70% of our playerbase between when the timestop bug hit, and when it was "fixed" the first time.

I will also point out, the required upgrade for time-stop forcibly altered obsidian's balance, as we left 51a and therefore a lot of hardcoded formula and how combat worked changed. I did my best to put it back as close as i could, but it never got exactly there. 51a had some quirks. Those who were around remember the royal PITA it was with tournaments daily trying to get weapon swings right again.


To me, my personal definition, is that in a balanced PVP situation (excluding overworld ganks), you have a varied amount of builds, and a varied amount of playstyles, that all run a decent chance of getting to the top. In obsidian pvp, around when the timestop hit, we had 7 effective builds in pvp. That's it. Every single tournament winner could be put into one of those 7 templates. The deviance of it was usually less than 50 skill points across the whole template. That to me says things were imbalanced, because there were too many "must-have" skills. After the changes started, before population dropped below 100, we were up to 12.

Crafting and Economy was a similar situation. It had worked up until that point, explicitly because it had a steady influx of new players, and the age bonus hadn't gotten extreme. The problem is obsidian's economy was never future-proof. It relied on people not being maxxed out, not using secondary accounts (which was always a cat and mouse game) and not macroing (another cat and mouse game). Once more people were maxxed out than were coming in, the economy was stagnating. So we had to introduce new craftables, and new uses for old ones, to keep it moving. Which upset the balance by definition, because the balance was now untenable.

However when you put in new craftable items (or drops) it upsets pvp balance, as there's now new things to take into account. Same with new skills. New combinations pop up.


So, with that in mind, lets look at the pillars.


Quote:
Personal list of how we could improve.
1. Bring the old system back that what we all loved and cherished. (Consists of Item drops as normal. Balance pvp by reverting dispell. Etc..)

Item drops as normal, elaborate on this one. Are you talking the luck system to prevent rng-screwed but keep total drops the same, the rework to fix a few monsters who were rediculously over-looted that people farmed exclusively, or the gold drop adder to ensure low monsters drop at least something worthwhile?

Re the pvp, covered in other sections how no single change exists in a vacuum, and balance inter-depends.
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2. Content, with the pillars in mind.
Example of great content you added was bosses/drops. They drop unique items that can give you that extra edge in battle vs someone who doesn't. The bless deeds are great because you can bless those boss items for 3 months. However even though they wont drop in pvp the boss items break quickly people have to decide if its worth it. (This content should be tested to perfect durability of items)
Anytime you add new content, it changes the balance of pvp. Case in point, lightning weapons became one of the de-facto targets. Not saying this was bad, just that pvp will constantly shift balance a bit as you add in new items, even if they're PvM only, because of how ultima pits PVP vs PVM.
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3. Events and in depth lore. Get creative create some lore and fun quest lines that drop unique rewards. For example once you have a ship ingame you can find a shipwrecked pirate crew. You end up helping them and at the end you are awarded with a cool pirate hat.
The most fun, and sadly also the one we get to do the least. Until most players are content, I stopped putting more than 10% of my time into lore stuff, which sucks because there's more fun quests i had that would take people awhile, but balance comes first.
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-Like venom stated much of the content was removed by echo ingame. I believe echo told me it was in anticipation of adding new content. There should be a rule implemented among staff that projects need to be nearly complete prior to implementing it. Meaning the only thing left to do is add stuff in.
Not to contramand echo because I don't know specific situations, but I will say at least part of those removals were probably world decay and bugs nuking shit, that he was being polite and convering until i could manually restore them from the backups. The world literally falls apart.
If you can let me know specifics i can look into and restore things that are missing or broke.
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-I like the idea of making all the skills relevant. Combining the skills with new content how you have been doing is a great mix.
This is an important statement to explore.
The problem is, part of the way to make all skills relevant, is by nerfing overpowered ones.
This is an age-old debate. People tend to argue, "Buff the weak skills, don't nerf the strong ones". But you can't do that all the time.
The reason being, is if you only buff, then you get power-creep. Content becomes easier/trivial/worthless.
The world (npcs, areas, drop rates) are all set to one balance baseline. Eventually, if the baseline creeps up enough, you have to re-do all of it.
Which isn't bad every once in a while, but on average you want to avoid it.

Likewise, if you buff one skill, sometimes other skills become overpowered now in combination. Which again upsets the balance and requires a nerf that you were trying to avoid in the first place.
Especially in ultima, where combination and skill mixes are everything.
Dispel, alone, was not a big issue.
Dispel + weapon drops + necromancy + stone potions was, and was just one of many.

Quote:
-Lastly, just something I've always wanted to see in game. We should utilize hues. There are so many in game but we are so limited. It would be cool to have some sort of daily task enticing players to get on by rewarding them with a currency spent on unique hues. Maybe a random hue potion with potential of rare ones.
That's been on the to-do list, but part of that goes back to getting someone who wants to tackle not only obsidian's buggy data files (literally have some crashable things in the muls that need fixing), but also the patcher. Which was very low on the to-do list while people still had major balance concerns.


So, for your pillars, you have two majorly conflicting goals:

Keep things the same <---> Add new stuff
The only new stuff that allows you to keep things the same is purely cosmetic things (and those still alter the economy).
Even informational items like the Akashic Record end up changing balance in small ways.
Gorge cloak, for example was something i never could have added in the old T2A, it would have been rediculously overpowered in the older system, due to interactions.

That's not to say we don't have overpowered things. Most of the vampires have at least one ability that needs a rework/rebalance/removal. The veteran age bonus, even though I capped it, is now near insurmountable vs a new player and makes for really unfair pvp.

So at the point, i guess it goes into a discussion of, "What changes specifically do we want rolled back, and are we willing to do something else to fix the issue it was put in for". Or else all we'll do is return to the 7 template pvp we had before where everyone was the same and most of the skills in obsidian are never used.
Which is great for a couple years, until everyone gets bored. Did you know during our peak playerbase our our retention metric was only 7% after 1 year?

But again, these are just my thoughts, 1 vote out of many, not the end all be-all.
Fixed the damn style finally, dear god that other one was unreadable.


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PostPosted: Sat Nov 24, 2018 6:37 am 

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First of all Hi its nice to see some interest in shard after all this time. I have read most of the conversation and I have to say everyone have good point. Iam not gonna make a long post cause I am a bit rusty writing but I want to say I am still around and still ready to help and Id play of course if thing change

Thing I like in the new OBS nothing ( I hate the races , I hate the quests , I hate the new crafting , I hate the new PVM luck based)

Thing that needed change from t3a pvp balance yes that was about all? And fix OLD race

OBS was the best because it was simple me and my mates used to say OBS is the best cause its simple ( simple is the best )

Hope my opinion count not here for bashing the work echo bob and all the staff put in the shard but we can all say it killed the fun we ad on here.

Love ya all DUEL AT BRIDGE NUB

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PostPosted: Mon Feb 04, 2019 8:31 am 

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What shape is Obsidian Shard in atm? Were the efforts to revive it fruitful? I'm definitely interested to jump back in.

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PostPosted: Wed Apr 24, 2019 10:51 pm 
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Game still live?


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PostPosted: Fri Apr 26, 2019 9:39 am 

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Well I am playing some, trying to get my friend to register as I write even right now, but it does not seem to work.

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PostPosted: Mon Apr 29, 2019 11:41 am 
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Well I am playing some, trying to get my friend to register as I write even right now, but it does not seem to work.
Hi Dario. Thank you for letting me know registration isn't working. I'll try to work with GM Bob to get it fixes asap.

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PostPosted: Mon Apr 29, 2019 1:06 pm 
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Game still live?
No players but its still up to play on.

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PostPosted: Tue Apr 30, 2019 1:48 am 

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Thank you, Kraken :)

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